dIes, he told his only child that, one day; "not in my lifetime but in yours," as many as a million Jews would live in the coun- try: "It sounded like science fiction, a fu- turistic, wild speculation." What came next, of course, is the diplomatic and military history of 1947- 1948: the United Nations declarations of two-state partition on November 29, 1947, and then the war that followed- Egypt, Syria, Transjordan, Lebanon, and Iraq on one side, the newly declared state of Israel on the other. In his journalism and essays, in books like "The Land of Israel" and "Under This Blazing Light," Oz harbors no illu- sions about the nature of that war-least of all about the displacement of more than seven hundred thousand Palestin- ian Arabs from their villages and cities and about their lives of misery in refu- gee camps throughout the region. At the same time, he argues, the Arabs were "under no obligation" to start a war after the U.N. partition plan. But in "A Tale of Love and Darkness" the narrator is not a disinterested historian; the point of view is that of a young boy seeing what he could see, listening to the broadcasts and speeches and rumors all around him. He describes collecting empty bottles to make Molotov cocktails, the suspension of school for an entire year, the rumor around the neighborhood that some fam- ilies had fled the country and that one had stashed cyanide tablets "just in case." ' of the Holocaust survivors had seen all this before, from the last weeks of August in 1939," Oz said about the first days of war. "The big change came on May 14th, with the expiration of the British Mandate. That Friday morning, I saw with my eyes the British leaving the Schneller Barracks and then the Ha- ganah"-the new Israeli Army-"rush- ing to take over. Then, on Fridayafter- noon, we were told that Israel is a nation now, it has a government, but one minute after midnight we were told that Israel is being invaded by five reglliar Arab armies, and that there was shelling and bom- bardment by artillery batteries. There was nowhere to send the kids, nowhere to go." For years, in Europe, Ois father had seen graffiti in German and Russian and Ukrainian: "Jews Go Home to Pales- tine." Years later, as a citizen of Israel, he saw new signs: ''Jews Out of Palestine." At one point in the memoir, Oz writes 88 THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 8, 2004 that as a child he hoped to "grow up to be a book." When I asked him about it, he smiled and said, "There was fear when I was a lime bo People would say; Enjoy every day; because not every child grows up to be a person. This was probably their way of telling me about the Holocaust or the frame of Jewish histo Not every child grows up. I know the Israelis be- come tiresome when they say that the whole world is against us, but back in the forties this was pretty much the case. I wanted to become a book, not a man. The house was full of books written by dead men, and I thought a book may survive." F aniàs father had owned a mill in Rovno, in western Ukraine, and came with his family to Haifa, in 1934, to work as a carter on the docks. In the book, Oz describes his mother's knowledge, in the mid-forties, that, on the outskirts of Rovno, in the Sosenki Forest, "among boughs, birds, mushrooms, currants, and berries," the Nazis had slaughtered more than twenty thousand Jews, with sub- machine guns, in two days. Even as a young boy; as he makes clear in "A Tale of Love and Darkness," Oz was keenly aware that his mother was adrift and that relations between his par- ents had eroded. Fania became increas- ingly depressed, withdrawn. ' ong the immediate reasons for my mother's de- cline was the weight of history, the per- sonal insult, the traumas, and the fears for the future," Oz said. "My mother had premonitions all. the time, probably be- cause of the trauma of the Holocaust. She might have sensed that what hap- pened to the Jews in her home town would sooner or later happen here, that there would be a total massacre. This is not something she would share with a little boy, except perhaps obliquely, through some of the stories and fairy tales she told, the books she read, a hair- raising Schopenhauerian world view." By the end of 1951, Faniàs black peri- ods had become worse and more frequent. Amos and his father were, he writes, "like a pair of stretcher bearers carrying an injured person up a steep slope." In ''A Tale of Love and Darkness," the reader knows early on that Fania is doomed, and at the end of the book, as she wan- ders the streets of Tel Aviv in a down- pour and, finally, takes her life with an overdose of sedatives, it is possible to get some sense of the son's loss and fury. Only now, after reaching an age when he is old enough to be the father of his lost mother, Oz told me, can he look at those days with a certain detachment. F ania Klausner killed herself in J anu- ary, 1952, Oz said, for countless reasons: "She died because, for her, Jerusalem was an exile. This climate and environment and realitywas alien. And she died because her hopes, if she had any, that maybe a replica of her Europe could be built here, without the bad aspects of the Diaspora Jewish shtetl, were apparently refuted by the reality of the morning after." F ani a was just thirty-eight years old. ' ter my mother died, my father and I never talked about her," he said. "We never mentioned her name, not once. If we referred to her at all, it was as 'she' and 'her.' We had plenty of discussions, po- litical discussions-he thought I was a Red-but never about her." W e were soon on Ben Yehuda Street, a pedestrian arcade lined with cafés, restaurants, bookshops, and trinket stores for tourists. The area around Ben Yehuda, one of the most crowded spots in Jerusalem, has been a popular site for suicide bombers. Oz had not been back to his old neigh- borhood for a few years, and he was un- characteristically quiet as we walked. Sud- denly; he ducked into an alley; headed up a small set of steps, and then went look- ing for a favorite cafe. " I ' h h " h . d " I ' t sere somew ere, e SaJ.. t s . h , H " rIg t... over. . . yes. . .. ere. The sign read "Tmol Shilshom"- "The Day Before Yesterday"-the utle of a novel by S. Y. Agnon. In Oz's youth, Agnon was the singlliar literary presence in Jerusalem, an immigrant from Galicia, who wrote in Hebrew and, in 1966, won the Nobel Prize. Oz mopped his brow and ordered a cold drink. Our walk through Kerem Avraham had been a kind of exercise, a perfonnance on request-the writer come home to the scene of the book, the scene of the crime. Oz seemed drained by it. "We've just visited a place that no longer exists," he said. At least, not as it was in the life and books of Amos Oz. "When I visited Oxford, Mississippi, I had to run back to Faulkner's novels. The place was a fading reproduction of the real thing." Nearly half of Ois books-